There are a variety of situations in the networking industry where a communication connection between two devices may not be possible or may be actively prohibited for security reasons.
For example, consider a situation where a customer engineer needs to establish a service connection with an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) to obtain an ATM transaction log. The ATM in question may have a malfunctioning Universal Serial Bus (USB) port (or even lack a USB port) and may not have the ability to communicate with a device of the customer engineer through WiFi or BLUETOOTH®. The customer engineer may be able to authenticate and access the ATM transaction log on the ATM but has no means to acquire the ATM transaction log, which the customer engineer is in need of. Moreover, the ATM may lack the ability to send the ATM log to a remote network server on behalf of the customer engineer because the ATM's network access is restricted to ATM networks that are tightly controlled for security reasons with limited or no access to other non-ATM networks.
In such a situation, the customer engineer has no ability to obtain the ATM transaction log because no conventional communication connection can be made to the ATM to obtain the ATM transaction log. This is even when it is clear that the customer engineer has authorized permission and may be required to obtain the ATM transaction log from the ATM.
There are other examples as well, which are not restricted to an ATM-use case where an individual has credentials and proper authority to access a file or piece of information from a device but lacks any ability to establish a software connection to that device using a device operated by the individual.
It is noted that it may not just be the case that the device having a file of interest to a user lacks an ability to establish a software connection with the user's device. That is, the user's device may lack an ability to use a software connection mechanism provided by the device having the file of interest.
It may also be as simple as the mechanism for obtaining a file of interest is through a portable memory device inserted into a USB/Secure Digital (SD) port of the device having the file, but the user lacks any portable memory device when present at the device having the file of interest. Here, the issue is one of convenience but it can be a significant inconvenience to the user depending upon the circumstances of the user.
Accordingly, there is a need for securely obtaining a file or data between at least two devices without a conventional software connection mechanism (USB, SD, WiFi, Ethernet, BLUETOOTH®, etc.).